Out now!  The new book on Social Informatics that should become a key statement on where the field is headed in the future.

Though the book contains thoughts on the past, present, and future, you’ll find my arguments in the ‘future’ section, in the chapter on “Social Informatics and Business Reform”.  Technology is completely intertwined with the structure and institutions of global business, affecting everything from wealth inequality to environmental unsustainability.  The strength of the Social Informatics tradition is in identifying value choices where people tend to see monolithic forces of technological or institutional change that can only be adapted to, but cannot be changed themselves.

Social Informatics research recognizes that every major technological change requires mobilizing significant social movements.  And for every movement, there can be a counter-movement.  I think an understanding of the global economic order is incomplete, and therefore the possibilities for reform are reduced, without an understanding of how technological change really works.

(By the way, the book is a better deal at the publisher site than at Amazon.)